


Lights on the River

by DoubleApple



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Angst, Harry Potter's Birthday, M/M, Memories, Sad and Sweet, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-31
Updated: 2018-07-31
Packaged: 2019-06-17 00:03:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,271
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15448830
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DoubleApple/pseuds/DoubleApple
Summary: After the war, Harry knows that no one has the energy to celebrate his stupid birthday. Which he hates, and which he doesn’t want anyone to acknowledge anyway. Right?





	Lights on the River

**Author's Note:**

  * For [cubedcoffeecake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/cubedcoffeecake/gifts).



> cubedcoffeecake, thank you for the wonderfully evocative Prompt 21! I took it a little loosely, but I hope I did it justice.

Harry has no one to blame but himself. 

At the pub, a few days ago, he’d told Ron and Hermione that he wanted nothing to do with his birthday. He’d hated it as a kid, he said, and he didn’t want a party. He’d asked them, honestly, to please ignore it. 

Ron had started to protest that Molly wouldn’t hear of ignoring a birthday. But his voice had trailed off when he’d realised there haven’t been any parties, no cakes or knitted jumpers or any gifts at all, since the war. Since Fred. 

Hermione had given Harry her trademark side-eye, not believing him for a moment, but too tired and distracted to argue. Although her parents are finally back from Australia, they’ve been in and out of St. Mungo’s for months. Their memory charm keeps resurfacing, tricky and powerful, and the Healers can’t figure out what’s wrong. Sometimes they don’t recognise Hermione, still. Sometimes they still don’t know their own names. 

So, Harry figures, no one has the energy to deal with his stupid birthday. He can’t believe this is only his 18th anyway. He feels a hundred years old, most of the time. 

31 July slides by with no fuss. Hermione did owl Harry a large box of Honeydukes’ sweets, which he’d eaten most of by the time the sun went down. Alone at Grimmauld Place, with the wards up tight around him, Harry lost himself in hours of video games, candy, and Muggle pop. Last week, he’d bought a packet of fags for the first time, but it’s been sitting untouched on his table since then. The smell reminds him of Privet Drive, of the ciggies that Petunia would sneak in the upstairs loo. They’d all pretended they didn’t know. 

By 8pm, Harry’s hungry and restless. He pulls on jeans and a cleaner t-shirt, and Apparates to a deserted alley behind a busy street. It’s hot, and the air feels thick with happy people being pissed and loud. Harry goes inside a Mexican place he’d been to once before, buys a burrito, and sits down at a small dirty table to eat it. But he can’t stay there, can’t stay still, so he gets up again and walks down to the riverbank. 

The burrito is oddly delicious — it’s the first real food Harry’s eaten in days, although he doesn’t realise — and he scarfs it down, taking huge bites and burning his mouth. He wishes he’d bought a drink. 

He crosses the empty park. Leaning against the retaining wall, he finishes the burrito and licks his fingers clean as he stares out at the river, which is hazy and indistinct in the streetlights. The hot air hangs still, and then Harry smells cigarette smoke, and then he’s aware of someone beside him. He turns and scrambles for his wand tucked in his waistband, but then he realises. It’s Draco Malfoy. 

He’s smoking and looking out at the river, leaning against the wall in the same posture as Harry himself, and Harry is sure he’s hallucinating. 

“Malfoy?”

Draco looks at him askance, long blond hair hanging in his eyes. He flicks it away with an impatient hand.

“Potter?” Draco mimics his voice sarcastically in that fucking maddening posh voice, and okay, Harry must not be hallucinating if Draco Malfoy is mocking him like the stuck-up prat he’s always been. They’ve seen each other a few times since the war; their whole Hogwarts cohort had spent some time together, aimless and edgy and searching for distraction anywhere they could find it, but Harry and Draco hadn’t spoken much. 

“What are you doing here?” Harry asks, his voice rough. He clears his throat. He’s barely said a word in days. 

Draco shrugs, the picture of casual insouciance.

“Seriously, Malfoy, how’d you find me?”

Draco shrugs again, infuriating as usual. “Wouldn’t you like to know? Don’t worry, Potter, I didn’t alert your rabid fans. No paparazzi. Happy birthday, by the way.”

Draco takes a last pull on the cigarette, burned down nearly to his fingers. Harry finds himself oddly distracted by Draco’s hands, his lips, his hooded eyes, the thin plume of smoke that issues from between them. With no breeze at all, the smoke just hangs like a cloud around them and Harry thinks of Petunia again, the crack at the bottom of the bathroom window, the indentation in the sill where her hand had rested so many times. It was spotlessly clean, always, but she’d left a mark just the same. 

“How’d you know it’s my birthday?”

“Everyone knows when your bloody birthday is.” Draco says it without bitterness, though, carefully stubbing out the cigarette on the bottom of his shoe and Vanishing the stub. 

“No one cares, though.” Harry sounds petulant, even to his own ears. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Draco says, again without any heat to the words. “Your insufferable Gryffindors were planning a gigantic rager. Even I was invited. They were going to surprise you — they only called it off yesterday, when they said you’d been acting odd and didn’t want a party.”

“Oh. Well, I didn’t. Or I thought I didn’t. I don’t know.” Stop talking, Harry tells himself, but somehow he can’t. “I hate my birthday. It was always rubbish when I was a kid, even worse than a normal day.”

Harry does manage to get himself to shut up, but he doesn’t manage not to think about his ninth birthday, which had fallen on a Saturday when Dudley was auditioning for some kind of football club. Harry had been dragged along to the tryouts. When a coach had asked whether Harry would be trying out as well, Vernon had told the coach he was slow in the head — those were the words he’d used, “slow in the head” — and couldn’t play. The coach had looked at Harry with such pity that Harry’d had to look away. 

Draco’s snapping his fingers in front of Harry’s face. 

“Hello, Potter, where did you go just now? I got you a birthday gift, you tosser.” His voice yanks Harry back to the present, when Draco is standing rather close to him and holding out his hand. “And it’s not the Floo address of a bloody Mind Healer, even though that’s what you properly need.”

Harry snorted. “Touché, Malfoy. Like you’re not a right mess too.”

“Well, I’m a right mess who got you this.” Draco is still standing there with his hand extended, something clenched in his fist. Harry flashes on their first meeting, Draco’s outstretched hand, their first kindling of rejection and anger. It would be different this time. 

Harry reaches out his own hand, palm up, and Draco places something round and silver in it. His fingertips brush Harry’s hand, and he can feel the briefest sense of coolness where they touched. 

“It’s a Rememberall,” Draco says, not looking at him. “For when you’ve forgotten something important. Or lost your way.” 

A flush of something strange — something good — settles over Harry. The Rememberall is smaller than any he’s ever seen before, and it’s solid and heavy and perfectly smooth. It feels right, somehow _correct_ , in his hand. 

“Thanks, Malfoy,” Harry says, and means it. 

Draco is still staring out at the mist and the lights glinting on the dark water. “Maybe it’ll be useful.”

“Yeah.” In Harry's hand, the Rememberall starts to glow faintly. “Maybe we’ll have something we want to remember, for a change.”

Draco nods formally, just a small duck of his head, and looks straight at Harry for the first time. His eyes reflect the lights, just like the river, and he says, “maybe we will.”


End file.
